Comment by john-h-k
3 hours ago
> allowing spicy autocomplete
Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is
This bolsters OP's point.
It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher".
There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care.
LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsibility of the end-user. As the tool at hand becomes more powerful, the care with which the end-user should treat that tool increases.
For some reason, with LLM-based systems, we seem to be going the opposite direction. As the tool becomes more capable people absolve themselves and others of more responsibility. This feels backwards to me.
(Aside: in a lot of ways, at least form a scientific and engineering perspective, modeling LLMs as "fundamentally auto-complete" is an incomplete theoretical model but one from which we can still get a lot of mileage.)
I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
> there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
I've thought a lot about how to safely deploy autonomous systems (even did a whole PhD on the topic, lol).
I think one can ethically deploy a system that has some degree autonomy. It takes a lot of work to do right. And the tooling for LLM-based systems isn't quite as mature as the tooling for e.g. control systems. Part of this is because so many resources in AI safety are misspent on problem statements that are myopic or grandiose. Between "don't say pii" and "prevent ASI extinction" there's a hard but tractable control systems-y view of AI safety.
But I don't think there is any sort of fundamental barrier that prevents us from building appropriately constrained LLM-based systems.
> And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
When responding to a position, especially on the internet, I try to empathize with the thing I'm responding to. Not just understand it, but sort of put myself in a mental state where I have an emotional attachment to my conversation partner's point of view.
With respect to Copyright as a legal framework in my country (USA): despite my best attempts, I really struggle to develop empathy for the viewpoint that LLMs/diffusion models are not a transformative use. I can certainly sympathize, but trying to actually put myself in the shoes of believing that training an LLM is a purely derivative and non-transformational work just feels far too alien. There are so many things that are "clearly transformative" but required so many orders of magnitude less scientific/technical/engineering genius.
Which isn't to say that the US legal system's definition of copyright is the morally correct one.With respect to copyright beyond the US legal system, or beyond legal denotations generally: I can certainly empathize.
Between driving a car and driving a forklift, which of them would you like to see regulated more heavily?
Not GP, but there are massive economic incentives both to make car driving as unregulated and to make forklift driving as regulated as possible, even though from pure injury risk standpoint it should be the other way around.
You don't get it. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to solve open math problems if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
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“Autocomplete” does not represent an analysis of its problem-solving capability, but of its place in the social order and its expected social competence.
> the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems
No it can't. It can't even solve my son's 4th grade math homework. (This is a real use case for me, not a dumb benchmark.)
You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you.
Terrence Tao disagrees with what you're saying. I think he's in a slightly better position to speak on the subject.
I would genuinely be interested in knowing what you're doing that led you to this conclusion.
I would be shocked if I was unable to solve 4th grade math homework with any of the contemporary frontier models. I spend most days using them to do significantly more complex things than that.
If they took a blurry photo of the piece of paper and uploaded to chatGPT saying "solve this" then I would totally believe it. The frontier models are mostly obnoxiously bad at OCR and properly ingesting what's on an image of a page.
If you write out the 4th grade math problem, they would have no trouble.
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> You just know nothing about math and are happy to parrot bullshit AI salesmen are selling you.
Not the parent poster here. I do know things about math. I wrote a few papers related to the unit distance problem (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10069, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15317) and spent quite some time trying to solve it. I had no chance of coming up with the proof that the spicy autocomplete came up with. Dumb benchmark, sure.
LLMs are good with symbolic manipulation but can't reason.
You can skirt around not reasoning in research math because so much of it is just extremely tedious symbolic manipulation.
You can't cheat with advanced fourth grade math, though. They don't know algebra yet and can't substitute verbosity for reasoning.
We've already long past that threshold.
Reasoning models with access to Python have been able to solve 4th grade math homework for over a year now. Prove me wrong: show me a 4th grade math problem they can't handle.
> show me a 4th grade math problem they can't handle
Sure.
"8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 - add minus signs and parenthesis to get 31."
P.S. There is an answer online and some LLMs will just copy it verbatim. This doesn't count.
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I don't spend much time interacting with zoomers, but I'm still surprised that "spicy $foo" sends fellow boomers through such a loop. I didn't have to puzzle it out, it was fun juxtaposition wordplay and when it's deployed well I still find it amusing.
This is an odd criticism. I am (A) a zoomer and (B) I wasn’t criticising the use of the word spicy? I am saying the comparison itself is bad